developer changelog

The second round of N Preview factory images and OTAs are out and most people are updated. The team at Android Police HQ is still digging around to find all of the new additions, but in the meantime, there are a number of changes buried right in the source code. Google posted some of the source code for 'N' to the Android Open Source Project, and we've built a changelog from that commit history.

During the preview stage of a new OS version, Google usually limits the code it releases to just GPL-licensed projects. Unfortunately, that excludes most of the parts of Android where the big new features and UI changes would have happened, but don't count out those changes as boring, they can still contain quite a few interesting details if you look a bit closer.

The factory images are up–some of them–so it's time to take a peek under the covers to discover any changes made to the Android Open Source Project for April's security updates. To make this a bit easier, we've generated changelogs based on the commit history that was just posted to AOSP last night.

As you might expect, the majority of the changes are going to be related to the issues set forth in the April Security Bulletin. A few others appear to be relatively small bug fixes, but nothing jumps out at me as a change that will directly affect user experience or any particularly noticeable bugs.

Are you tired of Android N already, or are you itching to get even deeper into the preview release? If you're leaning towards the latter, you may want to check out the changelog generated from a fresh code push to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Don't get too excited, this isn't a complete platform release (confirmed by Bill Yi), so it doesn't include things like the changes to the notification shade. Rather, the changes uploaded yesterday are mostly for the GPL projects used in Android, and there are still plenty of interesting bites of knowledge to take away from those, as well.

The latest factory images for the Nexus family have landed and people are getting their updates. What are they updating to? The changelogs built from developer comments can probably answer that, or at least give some pretty good hints.

Like most of the monthly updates, at least since Google started this practice, March's update focuses on security.

Google posted a security bulletin with a list of fixes found in this release, and there are a few pretty big ones this month. Five items have been tagged Critical, including two that allowed for remote code execution without any user interaction, and the remaining three could have been used for privilege escalation.

The monthly security update for January is starting to roll out to Nexus devices. Factory images turned up yesterday morning and now we've got some changelogs from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) if you're interested in taking a deeper look at exactly how things have been tweaked.

Unlike the 6.0.1 release in December, this month's adjustments appear to be entirely focused on security fixes. Google has a bulletin describing the relevant security issues addressed with this release. There are also a couple of builds specific to the Pixel C, including one that appears quite large. Like some of the previous changelogs, this is merely because it technically starts from a base version (i.e.

The factory images have landed and the OTAs are about to start rolling out shortly. As we already know, there are new emoji to fill out the Unicode 8.0 spec, band 12 support for T-Mobile, "until next alarm" for do not disturb mode, and a shortcut to launch the camera with a double-click of the power button. The December security updates are also an important part of the latest update. Of course, these aren't the only changes that take place, so we generate changelogs from the Android source code to find some of the other things going on with the OS.

Google's monthly security updates are out in the form of factory images, and that means it's time for some new code in AOSP. Since these versions are dedicated to closing security holes, there certainly won't be any new features and the bug fixes probably won't have much effect on battery life or performance, but they will keep the baddies from treating your phone like it runs an old version of Windows.

A number of serious vulnerabilities were fixed in this release, including two critical issues that could be used for remote code execution. Details have been posted on the Nexus Security Bulletin.

With any update to Android, it can be good to know more than just the major features and changes. Sometimes we've got to dig into the deepest little adjustments to figure out why something is working better – or worse – than before. We've now got the changelogs posted for all of the Android versions released yesterday, including both the major update to Android 6.0 Marshmallow and the much smaller 5.1.1 security updates for October.

The v5.1.1 updates aren't very exciting since they only account for about a dozen security fixes. The changelogs may not even be the best way to read about what has changed because there's a post in the Android Security Updates group that lists each of the issues that have been resolved with this month's updates.

T-Mobile began rolling out security-centric updates to Nexus devices yesterday. As we already know, there aren't any big changes due out in this release, but Google has pushed the latest code up to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) for the world to see. As usual, we've put together a changelog for easy reading.

Updates for T-Mobile devices are built from a dedicated branch in AOSP with custom code to support the Wi-Fi calling feature. As it turns out, the list of changes for this update to LMY48M closely resembles the r6 to r9 update from last month, otherwise known as the update that (mostly) fixed Stagefright.